The European Union Youth Orchestra’s summer tour is the biggest event of its season. The 111-strong Orchestra will hold major residencies in its home in Grafenegg (Austria) and at the Bolzano Festival Bozen (Italy), and give further concerts at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Wiesbaden Kurhaus, Berlin Konzerthaus, and Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie. Over 10,000 seats will be available to experience the Orchestra live, while thousands more people will be reached through recordings, broadcasts, and social media.
The tour welcomes conductors Sir Antonio Pappano and Manfred Honeck, and soloists Julia Fischer (violin), and Benjamin Grosvenor and Martin James Bartlett (piano). Two full-scale symphonic programmes present music by Beethoven, Richard Strauss, James MacMillan, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich; wrap-around chamber music and outreach events add composers de Arriaga, Bacewicz, Coleman, de Falla, Ibert, Kopetzki, Malando, Manoury, Márquez, Ravel, Thomas, Tomasi, Turrin, Scheidt, Shalygin, Skoryk, and Viardot to the mix. Behind the scenes, the EUYO Summer Tour 2023 is underpinned by new experimental music labs, encompassing musicians’ mental wellbeing, deep dives into repertoire, and new rehearsal techniques.
“One side of EUYO’s work is performing in Europe’s pre-eminent concert halls with world-class artists and Europe’s finest young players. The other is approaching music in more diverse, experimental ways. There is also the question of how an orchestra prepares for performance, and this summer we are embarking on an exploration of new ways to rehearse: more focused, more active, more experimental. Audiences may not see this work, but I am confident that they will experience the result, as the EUYO respects – but also pushes – the boundaries of what constitutes a great orchestra.”
– Marshall Marcus, EUYO Executive & Artistic Director
The European Union Youth Orchestra is one of the world’s pre-eminent symphony orchestras, described by former President of the EU Commission Jean-Claude Juncker as “the best possible ambassador for the European Union”, by the UK Guardian as having “gripping, exhilaratingly good orchestral playing, surging with energy, laser-sharp focus and collective daring”, and by the New York Times as “one of the elite organisations of its type”. Since its beginnings in 1976 with Founding Music Director Claudio Abbado, it has worked with the greatest international musicians and appeared many hundreds of times across five continents. The Orchestra makes tangible the highest ideals of the European project: united in diversity and working together in harmony, creating electrifying music that transcends the sum of its parts.
EUYO is supported by the European Commission’s Creative Europe programme, the Austrian Federal Ministry of Arts, Culture, Civil Service and Sport, Grafenegg Kulturbetriebsgesellschaft m.b.H., the Provincial Government of Lower Austria, the Department of Art and Culture St. Pölten, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Comune di Bolzano, and the European Union’s 27 Member States.